A Very Special Conondrum
by Jane Poirot
Summary: A semi-cracky (no pun intended) take on the Very Special Episode formula, set around S6. Drugs are bad. Say no to drugs!


Disclaimer: The Big Bang Theory belongs to Chuck Lorre. I had the vaguest conception for a fic like this around a few years ago (hence, why some continuity facts may contradict with others-let's say, for the sake of argument, this takes place around season six-ish) when Arrow started airing Wednesday evenings on CTV, in BBT's usual time slot. I had forgotten about it, and was surprised to be greeted with the disclaimer "The following program contains scenes of violence and mature subject matter. Viewer's discretion is advised." In the brief second before Arrow came on, my reaction was basically "WTF? Is this a very special episode where Sheldon blows up the lab or something?" I thought about it some more, and thus, this fic was born. Enjoy!

…

It began on a bright Tuesday morning. As always, Sheldon got up, vacated his bowels, had breakfast, got dressed, and went to work. As always, Leonard and Penny got into another argument that threatened to tip their relationship on the scale yet magically slid back to the "yay we're so happy together" side. And as always, Raj and Stuart had sizzling sexual tension that sadly went nowhere.

But let's put the last two events aside for a moment and focus on the first one: Sheldon, as mentioned, went to work. He went to work under the impression that this was going to be just another ordinary day at work where he...did stuff. Physicist stuff. Smart people stuff.

When he arrived at his office, he began to feel tired. Not "tired" as in fall-asleep-on-my-feet tired, but rather I-should-not-have-stayed-up-two-hours-past-my-bedtime-to-beat-Dragon's-Quest-but-I-was-oh-so-close-I-couldn't-help-it-and-now-I'm-paying-for-it tired. After several minutes of attempting to tackle his trusty white board, Sheldon decided to stop by the vending machine and order up five Gatorades, figuring that the sugar might do him some good.

But alas, the liquids did not do his bladder much good.

And this was how Sheldon, at 10:30 A.M., came to be standing in the men's room at the urinal, just in time for three shady-looking individuals to strut in. How did he know these figures were shady? Because they dressed in black, leather trench coats, wore dark sunglasses, had greasy hair, a smirk that suggested they were the ones who owned the campus, and, in the biggest telltale sign of all, they were _smoking._

"Excuse me." By now, Sheldon had done his business, and felt an inexplicable need to talk to these three shady characters. "Are your reading comprehension skills at the level of a Neanderthal child? It _says,"_ he pointed to the bright orange sign with a cigarette crossed out in the middle, "'no smoking'."

"Oh yeah?" The tallest shady figure cracked his knuckles. "Read my fists. They _say_ 'keep your mouth shut if you knows whats good for ya'."

Sheldon's bravado diminished, and he began to wonder if now would be a good time to come up with a witty rhetoric, or if he should excuse himself. Before he could make up his mind, the medium-sized shady figure said:

"Wait, wait, I think we're being too harsh on our good friend, here. Maybe he just needs to have his mind opened up a bit, eh?"

He slipped a small Lucky 7 carton out of his front pocket. He opened the lid and extended it towards Sheldon. Inside, there was a row of cigarettes.

"What?" the short shady figure piped up. "Cigarettes not your style? Fine. Look what _I've_ got."

He pulled a small, plastic bag out of his pocket and laid it on the counter. Inside the bag were dozens of small, candy-coloured pills. Then, he pulled out a second bag full of white powder with white needles sticking out.

"Take your pick." The short shady figure wiggled his eyebrows.

Sheldon sputtered, "Absolutely not! I find the very _idea_ of taking drugs to be—"

Just then, the men's bathroom door was kicked open by Barry Kripke, dressed in gym shorts, who yelled "Incoming!"

And then he smacked a ball labelled "Idiot Ball" right at Sheldon's head.

"I said 'incoming' Coopah," Barry scoffed. "I gotta go back to the spoat's tou'nament. See ya latah!"

Barry turned and ran. Sheldon picked up the Idiot Ball and said with a smile, "Oh what the heck! How much harm could trying drugs just the one time do?"

…

As it turned out, trying drugs just the one time did a lot of harm.

Sheldon only tried just one drug—which one? Eh, doesn't matter, but let's go with "marijuana pills" because "marijuana" and "pills" just sound like a good combination. Who cares about accuracy? We need to hammer home the message that all drugs will ruin your life, damn it!

So. Anyway. Drugs.

Sheldon took just one marijuana pill and immediately, the effects began to take place. He felt relaxed, at ease, like he was a deity whose existence he denied. His confidence spiked, and he felt giddy enough to barge into the lab and declare himself king of the world.

"I'm king of the wooorrrrlllld!" Sheldon declared as he dashed through the science lab. The other scientists looked up as Sheldon danced and giggled, high as a man high on drugs. He did pirouettes in a remarkably well-balanced manner for someone on drugs. I mean seriously, have you ever tried to do ballet after taking pain killers? What the fuck do you think taking marijuana pills would do?

"Okay, Sheldon, that's enough!" one of the scientists laughed nervously, trying to steer Sheldon away from the beakers which contained highly volatile chemicals that would probably explode when mixed together.

Anyway, Sheldon declared, "I'll tell you when I've had enough!" He grabbed the scientist by the arm and swung them around in a clumsy semi-dance. As the two pounced around the lab, Leonard opened the door and said, "Hey guys, can you keep it down in here? I'm trying to concen—SHELDON!?" he cried out at the sight of the dance-fever-stricken scientist. "What on Earth are you doing!?"

"Well, observe the facts here, Leonard," Sheldon said as he continued to dance with the confused scientist arm-in-arm. "I am engaging in a physical activity often reserved for social functions we used to fail to get asked out to in high school." He dipped the scientist. "This activity involves moving the arms, legs, and feet in a perfect coordination while also gripping the sweaty palms of one's dance partner, and risk getting an influenza virus from them in the process."

Sheldon stopped. He looked into the eyes of the scientist, who smiled nervously. Sheldon grimaced and shoved him off, then grabbed the nearest bottle of ethyl alcohol, wrenched the cap open, and poured the liquid onto his hands. And this highly flammable alcohol splashed onto the floor.

"Can you answer your own question, Leonard?" Sheldon asked, raising an eyebrow.

Leonard frowned and walked up to Sheldon. "What's up with your eyes?" he asked, now noticing the increasing redness spreading throughout his friend's eyes.

"Oh, just a bit of dry eye, that's all," Sheldon said in a sing-song voice. "I really should get eye drops, shouldn't I? Be a lamb and go pick some up from the drugstore for me, will you, Leonard?"

Leonard put his hands on his hips. "Not until you tell me what the hell is going on!" he demanded. Sheldon scoffed and began to walk back towards the beakers. Leonard followed after him and protested, "Sheldon!"

" _I_ went to college at age _eleven,_ " Sheldon boasted as he hoisted himself up onto the counter. " _And_ I got my first Ph.D at age _sixteen._ I can do whatever the hoo-ha I very well please." He flashed a manic grin towards the frightened scientists. "Including doing the can-can."

Sheldon began to kick his legs out while waving his arms wildly as he raced down the counter. And during this dance, he did something completely unpredictable and unexpected: He knocked the beakers over. What a shocking turn of events!

In the split second before the beakers crashed upon the floor, Leonard leaped faster than a hero in slow-motion and pushed Sheldon off the counter, and shoved him out the door.

Sheldon, and two other scientists, were the only ones to escape before the lab was engulfed in a giant orange ball of fire.

…

By the time Sheldon finally came off his higher-than-a-kite cloud and sobered up, the damage had been done. He barely remembered what he had been doing over the past fifteen minutes, but now, he was standing outside the university with hundreds of professors, scientists, and students, feeling very cold on this unusually chilly February afternoon. Ambulances, fire trucks, and police cars were zipping towards the building. He suddenly felt frightened and confused and started to call out for his friends.

(Oh, and the drug dealers died in the blast, so they'll never appear again)

"Leonard? Leonard? Leonard?" Sheldon called out. "Raj? Raj? Raj? Howard? Howard? Howard?...Le—"

"Sheldon!"

Sheldon spun around. Howard and Raj ran up to him, their faces aghast with worry. "Did you hear what happened?" Howard asked, his Ringo-esque bangs blowing in the wind. "The lab blew up in some freak accident!"

"Yeah, and some say some idiot knocked over the beakers," Raj said. "I wonder who that person was?"

Sheldon rubbed the back of his neck as the events of sixteen minutes ago came back to him. "Well, gee, I don't know, but let's all blame that idiot, that moron, that scoundrel, that—"

He froze at a sight so heartbreaking that even this narrator cannot find it in her stone cold heart to put a funny twist on it: Leonard was being carried out on a stretcher, his eyes closed, his unconscious body trembling. He had miraculously avoided getting incinerated, but his injuries were still grievous and bloody.

Sheldon shook and tried to call out to the paramedics, but the words caught in his throat. Howard said something about how they were going to drive down to the hospital the first chance they got, but Sheldon barely heard it. All he could think about was how his best friend was dying, and it was all his fault.

…

By the time they arrived, Sheldon was dealing with two crippling burdens: His devastation over his best friend, and a growing withdrawal for the accursed pills that had caused this whole mess. He needed those pills. He needed them. He _needed_ them!

While Howard and Raj were waiting for Penny, Bernadette, and Amy to arrive, Sheldon excused himself and ran off to the bathroom. Maybe, if he was lucky, someone would have a spare bottle. After all, those pills had to have come from somewhere, right? Something cannot come out of nothing!

Sheldon hated these grimy, dirty hospital bathrooms, and would rather not be in here unless his bladder and/or bowels deemed it absolutely necessary, but he was an addict after trying drugs just the one time, because that is totally how drug addiction (and addiction in general) works in real life. Forget other little factors like environment, personal biochemistry, or even those other factors Sheldon and his "cousin Leo" debated a hundred seasons ago—we need to hammer home the message that drugs are bad for you, damn it!

Just as Sheldon was about to give up hope, an old man came into the bathroom holding a bottle of pills in his hands. Like a cat drawn to a tuna can opener, Sheldon walked up to the man and said, "Excuse me, that bottle violates health-safety protocols and I will need to take it away from you."

The man squinted. "Who the heck are _you?"_

Sheldon snatched the bottle from the man's hand and said, with bug-eyes, "I'm Sheldon Cooper, _bitch."_

The man was so taken aback by this brazen display of wit, he didn't even noticed Sheldon storming out of the bathroom with the bottle in his hands (but Sheldon waited five minutes until someone else opened the door, of course).

…

Penny sat by Leonard's side in the sick bay, trying to block out the sounds of doctors coming and going. He had been stabilized, and the doctors now allowed visitors, but he was still unconscious and had to be kept at the hospital a bit longer just in case he took a turn for the worse. Blinking back tears, she held Leonard's hand in hers and lightly stroked his knuckles with her thumb.

"Poor Leonard," Bernadette said, grasping Howard's hand as the two hung back with Raj. "I wonder what happened to him."

"Well, apparently, he got caught up in some kind of explosion at the lab, but we don't know what caused it," Howard sighed. "It was probably some idiot mixing chemicals they shouldn't have."

Bernadette nodded thoughtfully. "Kind of like mixing Ebola and the common cold, huh?" Although the time was not very appropriate for jokes (not to mention this particular one could come off as being in very poor taste given certain relatively recent events), we must insert comedy wherever possible in our little anti-drug PSA or else we might alienate those whom we're trying to educate. And that's just unthinkable!

"I wonder if Sheldon had something do with it," Raj said.

Howard shook his head. "Nah, Sheldon's a nutbar, but he'd never do anything to actually kill us."

"Not intentionally, at least," Raj said. "Do you remember the time where Sheldon tried to turn himself into a robot so that he could live forever?"

Bernadette raised an eyebrow. Howard groaned, "Long story, tell you later in bed. Anyway, yeah, go on."

"Well…" Raj stroked his chin. "Leonard told me that apparently, while driving him to work, Sheldon almost caused him to get into a car accident. Who's to say he wouldn't cause a lab accident by insisting the other scientists were doing it all wrong and then trying to do it better himself?"

Before he could speculate any further on the subject, Amy Farrah Fowler came running in and said breathlessly, "Where's Sheldon?"

Raj shrugged. "Beats me. He's probably in the bathroom."

"Vacating his bladder and/or bowels, I presume?" Amy said, pacing back and forth. She spotted Leonard, and walked over to console her bestie. "How you holding up, bestie?"

Penny gulped and said, her voice warbling with sadness like a sad kitten, "Awful. If Leonard doesn't make it, I'll never get to tell him I'm sorry for our last fight."

"What was it about?" Amy asked. She draped an arm around Penny's shoulder. Penny sniffled and leaned her head against Amy's. "The same conflict that goes on every week, what else? We didn't even get to the make-up sex yet!"

Before Amy could point out to Penny that Albert Einstein had once defined insanity as 'doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results' (while also ignoring her own repeated failed attempts at seducing Sheldon Cooper), Sheldon slid into the room like a rock star and declared, "I'm baaaack!"

"Sheldon!" Amy leaped up and ran over to Sheldon, but he held up his hands and said, "Hands off the Cooper!"

Amy backed up and frowned. "Sheldon, are you okay?"

Howard, Raj, and Bernadette spun around as Sheldon babbled, "Okay, I'm more than okay! I'm fantastic! I'm floating on a cloud—which is physically impossible, but suspend your disbelief, because it's a metaphor—and I feel better than I've ever felt in five minutes!"

Bernadette squinted and peered into Sheldon's wide, bug-like eyes. "Oh my God," she gasped. "Are you taking _drugs?"_

"Oh, who cares about that?" Sheldon scoffed. "Drugs are cool, drugs are great, drugs make you feel good, so what's the harm in trying them just once, huh? Oh sure, I accidentally blew up the lab while I was high on drugs, but who cares?"

" _Just_ the once?" Penny asked. "And anyway, what about your Cousin Leo? You, of all people, should know how drug addiction can tear a family apart."

"Oh, Cousin Leo wasn't real," Sheldon said, waving a hand. "He was just an abstract Leonard and I made up so we wouldn't have to listen to your terrible singing."

" _What!?"_ Penny burst out, but Howard stepped in: "Never mind that—Sheldon, you're changing the subject." He walked up to Sheldon and said, with a look of complete disbelief on his face, "Don't you realize how stupid this is? How you almost _killed_ your nearest and dearest _best friend?"_

He gestured over to Leonard. Sheldon blinked rapidly and said, "I'm sure that if Leonard were conscious enough to respond to you, he'd tell you that I can quit any time I want. _He's_ a true blue friend. Well, okay, except for that time where he revoked the roommate agreement—"

"Hey, hey, speaking of that agreement, isn't there a passage in there somewhere about how you're not to use drugs in the apartment?" Howard said, snapping his fingers.

"Yeah, that's right!" Raj exclaimed. "One time, you kicked me out when I tried to get drunk off of cough syrup just to talk to Penny! That's not cool, dude," he added.

"Oh, pish-posh, Raj," Sheldon scoffed, waving his hands around like a bad 'jazz hands' impression. "Cough syrup is absolutely revolting. I for one can't imagine why anyone would ever want to get drunk off of something like that. Now, marijuana pills, on the other hand, are a literal bottle of laughter!"

"Sheldon." Amy marched up to him. "I've studied the effects of addiction in monkeys. I've seen what long-term drug addiction does to their brains and their bodies. It was too late for them. But it's not too late for you. You still have a chance to stop taking drugs now, before it's too late."

"Yeah," Penny spoke up. "Besides, taking drugs is _so_ stupid. You don't need to take drugs to fit in or to feel good about yourself. You just need to be yourself."

Sheldon blinked rapidly. "Sarcasm? I mean, really, Penny, given your own propensity to rely on alcohol to solve your baggage for you, plus your tendencies to openly mock me for marching to the beat of my own drum, I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic."

"Well, okay, in your case, not _yourself_ -yourself, but…you know what I mean!" Penny insisted. "You can rise above it! Say no to drugs! It's what smart people do!"

"Yeah, Sheldon." Amy placed her hands on Sheldon's shoulders. "Say no."

Sheldon smirked. "Hmm…nope! Bazinga!"

He said "Boop!" and lightly tapped Amy on the nose.

Which caused her to collapse in a heap on the floor.

"Amy!" everyone (sans Leonard, who was still unconscious) gasped as they gathered around her. Sheldon stood in a stunned, shocked silence. He felt like Peter Parker at the end of that stupid dance scene that could've been cut and not made a difference in _Spider Man 3_. One minute, he was so exuberant, so exuberant; now he was so…terrified! What had he done? He was a _**monster.**_ And all because of one, little pill bottle.

Sheldon fell to his knees. "Amy, are you hurt?"

Amy sat up and said, "I'm okay, everyone. I just don't expect to get 'booped' very often."

Howard shook his head in disgust and said, with a stony face, "Look at how far your addiction has taken you, Sheldon. Look at all the people you have hurt because of your marijuana pill addiction. Look at the man it's turned you into. Look at what you've _become._ "

Sheldon grasped the pill bottle in his hands and tossed it aside. "Never again."

Just then, he heard a pair of footsteps. He stood up. It was the man from the bathroom. He said, "Uh, hi, can I have my drugs back?"

Sheldon narrowed his eyes. "No."

"What?" the man said.

"You heard me—no!" Sheldon insisted. "I refuse to try any more drugs, ever again, as long as I live! From here on forth, I, Sheldon Lee Cooper, will say no to drugs! I will rise above the influence! No—I _am_ the influence!"

And then someone clapped.

Everyone slowly turned around. Leonard had opened his eyes and slowly clapped his hands with a weak smile. Penny squealed and ran to his side. She planted a kiss upon his lips, and all was right with the world.

Until the next time they got into a fight over some insignificant bullshit, but that's another time. We don't want to spoil the fluffies while they're still good.

…

So in short, Sheldon became addicted to drugs in the morning, angsted in the afternoon, and then successfully beat it in the evening, because that's totally how drug addiction works in real life. A tragic issue that tears families apart and ruins people's lives on several different levels was easily beaten and overcome in just one day, which is in no way insulting to those who have been impacted by drug addiction. That's no small feat. Sheldon recognized this and decided to celebrate with a pizza party.

"You know, there is one addiction that does have actual benefits to it!" Sheldon brought up as everyone sat in a circle in Sheldon and Leonard's apartment (but with Sheldon sitting in his spot, of course). "Science!"

"I thought you were going to say My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic!" Raj piped up. He quickly added, "Not that I would know or anything, just going off second-hand reports, you know how it is. Like Ebola and the common cold."

Bernadette smiled passive-aggressively. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"As I was saying," Sheldon went on, "science is knowledge, and knowledge is power, and with knowledge, you, too, can say no to drugs! Yes, you!" He pointed at Penny, who blinked and said, "Say what, buttercup?"

"And you!" Sheldon pointed at Stuart, because everyone loves to shit on Stuart. Stuart stood at the fridge in the kitchen and blinked. "Yeah, I just came over to make myself a Swiss cheese sandwich, since I can't pay the electrical bills, and a mouse stole the last piece of cheese I had, and then died."

"And yes…" Sheldon declared dramatically, "even…you!" He appeared to be pointing at the audience.

In reality, he was pointing at Raj's parents on Skype (courtesy of Raj's laptop). They blinked unamusingly at Sheldon. Then, Raj's father spoke up:

"Leonard, what is the point you are trying to make?"

"My point," Sheldon said, deciding not to let the name mix-up spoil his mood, "is that _you_ have the power! Say no to drugs!"

Raj's mother said slowly, "Are you high?"

"Oh, now, way to miss the point!" Sheldon scoffed. "It's almost like we'll learn nothing and act like this whole episode never happened!"

Raj's father rubbed his forehead and muttered, "This is the last time we let our son talk us into having dinner with his friends."

And thus, on that high note (no pun intended), we can now close off this Very Special Conundrum with:

The End


End file.
